Report: Central America should embrace intermodal

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Governments in Belize, Central America and the Dominican Republic should create an environment that embraces an integrated, intermodal sea-land network, according to a recent report by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
A stronger supply-chain network would help push global trade forward and would also encourage trade exchanges between the countries in the region.
The two authors of the study, Amar Ramudhin and Don Ratliff, posit that a number of initiatives would vastly improve trade in the region. They explain that each government should create a transportation oversight committee in charge of land and sea transport; increase investment in roadways between origin and destination points as well as the land links between countries; and improve treaty agreements.
The authors found that transportation data for the countries is lacking, making proper decision-making about supply chain processes extremely difficult, and this needs to be improved. More attention needs to be focused on creating freight transport and logistics observatories, a task in which the IDB will offer aid.
Special attention to developments in and around the Panama Canal is also important.
“The expansion of the Panama Canal will very likely create one or more mega hubs on the Atlantic, and it is crucial that countries work with the carriers to develop good connectivity with these hubs,” the authors wrote in the study.
In creating these goals, the authors found that it was important to look at the transportation network holistically. When starting the report, they initially began by exploring how to improve the ports and sea network in the region, but they quickly realized that a narrow approach that didn’t consider intermodal activity wouldn’t ultimately achieve their goal.
“Meaningful recommendations could not be reached with a siloed approach that did not take into consideration that ports networks are subsets of freight logistics chains or bigger intermodal networks that span multiple countries and multiple regions of the world,” they wrote in the report.
Ratliff is executive director of the Georgia Institute of Technology's Supply Chain & Logistics Institute (SCL), and Ramudhin serves as SCL's director of supply chain management and technology. - Jon Ross